Teen students in U.S.: stressed for success.

A current school of thought holds that teenagers living in Asian countries pay a psychological price for their mathematical superiority to adolescents in the United States. Some U.S. parents and teachers suspect that high-achieving Asian students feel more nervous, depressed, and overburdened in response to the pressures of maintaining academic eminence.

A cross-cultural study now supports a link between mathematics success in high school and frequent psychological distress--but only for U.S. students, not those in Japan or Taiwan.

"High academic achievement, such as that exhibited by students in Taiwan and Japan, can be attained without necessarily increasing students' reports of psychological distress," contend David S. Crystal and Harold W. Stevenson, both psychologists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and their coworkers.

A teenager's peers and family in the two Asian countries typically help to maintain academic achievement through various forms of support, Crystal's team asserts. But U.S. high achievers get torn between the desire to spend extra time on their studies and to pursue myriad nonacademic interests touted by peers and parents, they argue. These include socializing with friends, playing sports, dating, and working at a part-time job.

Moreover, the same researchers have found that parents and children express lower expectations for academic success in the United States than in Japan and Taiwan (SN: 1/9/93, p.28).

Crystal and his colleagues administered questionnaires to 1,386 U.S., 1,633 Taiwanese, and 1,247 Japanese eleventh graders, who averaged 17 years old. Participants rated the frequency with which they felt stressed or pressured, depressed, aggressive (such as wanting to hit someone or destroy something), and anxious about school work. They also noted anxiety-related physical complaints, such as headaches, stomachaches, and sleep troubles.

The researchers interviewed approximately 200 additional eleventh graders in each country. Native speakers of each language asked these students to explain when and why they felt stressed or depressed at home, at school, and in other situations.

All volunteers took a challenging mathematics test. Items ranged from calculating fractions and percentages to the solution of problems of limits and the addition of tangents and secants.

Although students in Japan and Taiwan noted greater parental dissatisfaction with their school work and higher parental expectations for academic performance than did U.S. students, the former groups also cited less frequent stress, anxiety, and aggression, the researchers report in the June CHILD DEVELOPMENT.

Japanese teenagers reported the fewest instances of depressed mood and physical problems, whereas Taiwanese youngsters noted the greatest frequency of those conditions. In a comparison of those with high and low scores on the math test, Asian high scorers reported less emotional and physical distress than low scorers. In contrast, U.S. high scorers cited these symptoms more frequently than low scorers.

Interviews indicated that more students in the United States and Taiwan than in Japan regarded school as a source of stress. Only U.S. teens mentioned sports and part-time jobs as additional causes of tension. Japanese students most often cited peers as stressful.

High achievers in the United States devoted much more time to studying than low-achieving peers but expressed the same level of interest in out-of-school activities, the scientists note. "Adolescent culture" in the United States may present academic achievers with the most conflict over how to arrange daily activities, they argue.